CHGIS - THL Tibetan Townships

(c) 2012 Karl Ryavec, Tibetan and Himalayan Library, CHGIS

License:  Creative Commons - Attribution Non-Commerical Share Alike
Details: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
free unlimited use for academic research.
no commercial use, resale, or redistribution permitted.

Draft Date:  August 2009
Revised:  Mar 2012
Editor:  Lex Berman
POC:  chgis@fas.harvard.edu

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Citation:   "Tibetan Townships of 2009.  Edited by Karl Ryavec, Lex Berman, Quentin Devers, David Newman.  Published in CHGIS V5, 2012."
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GIS Point Layer:  V5_2009_Tibet_twns_pts_utf  (with joined attribute table)
		  V5_2009_Tibet_twns_pts_GEOM  (with point objects only and Unique IDs)  

Attributes:  Tibet_twns_2009_utf8.csv

Contributors:

Karl Ryavec, University of Wisconsin  (original georeferencing of locations)
Quentin Devers, Tibet and Himalayan Library (processing of THL records)
David Newman, Tibet and Himalayan Library (feature identification and name verification)
Lex Berman, China Historical GIS (final editing and GIS processing)
Wendy Lihong Duan, Diamond Bay Research (data entry of Chinese Characters)

Compilation notes:

This dataset represents a series of projects by various researchers.  The basic history of the data collection  is as follows: 

1.  Karl Ryavec gathered extensive sources on Tibetan census, townships and temples.  He edited these into tables and georeferenced the townships against 1:200,000 basemaps.   
2. The resulting table of townships and related photocopies of census lists was passed to Lex Berman, who worked with Wendy Lihong Duan to input the Chinese characters from the census.  These were organized by Guobiao code tables of 1990, then later cross-referenced to 1995 and 1999.  

3. The Chinese name lists and cross-references were passed to David Newman, who undertook the compilation of the THL gazetteer and organized  the features by type and the schema developed for the THL project at University of Virginia.  

4. The resulting gazetteer was subsequently developed by Quentin Devers, who returned the coordinate locations and corresponding THL ID numbers to Lex Berman.  

5. Lex reorganized the data from Devers according to 1990 Guobiao Codes and their corresponding CITAS 1990 county level units.   By means of spatial joins and various Unicode processing methods, Lex merged the THL township points with the parent county and district names, including Chinese Characters, and the original Tibetan scripts from Devers.  
Finally, by joining the UTF8 encoded attributes to the shapefile, all the Tibetan township features could be labeled in Tibetan or any of the other UTF-8 fields in Quantum GIS.

Sample Screenshots:

The sample images show the shapefile [V5_2009_Tibet_twns_pts_utf] in QGIS, with various labels from the attribute table.



[ESRI SOFTWARE NOTE:  Users of ArcGIS and ESRI products in general may have trouble viewing the Unicode UTF8 characters.  In previous versions of ArcGIS (up to ArcMap 9.x) it was possible to import the .csv tabular data into Microsoft ACCESS and then join the resulting .mdb file to the shapefile containing the Geometry.   This allowed viewing and labeling in ArcMap.   However, with ArcMap 10.x, and the new release of ACCESS in Microsoft Office 2010, the file format has changed to .accdb.   It is unclear if the same process will work.  We were unable to import the .csv file using the normal procedure, although the .csv is clean and opens perfectly in OpenOffice, or any Unicode compliant text editor, including Notepad.]

[QGIS Users:  no worries]

Original Sources
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GB 2260 - 91
"Zhonghua renmin gongheguo xingzhengquhua daima"
(Codes for the administrative divisions of the PRC) - GB 2260 - 91
Beijing: Guojia jishu jianduju, 1992.

GB 2260 - 95
"Zhonghua renmin gongheguo xingzhengquhua daima"
(Codes for the administrative divisions of the PRC) - GB 2260 - 95
Beijing: Guojia jishu jianduju, 1996.

GB 2260 - 99
"Zhonghua renmin gongheguo xingzhengquhua daima"
(Codes for the administrative divisions of the PRC) - GB 2260 - 99
Beijing: Guojia jishu jianduju, 1999.

Zhongguo Diminglu - 1994
"Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo Dituji Diming Suoyin"
(Placename Index of the PRC Atlas)
Bejing: Zhongguo dituji chubanshe, 1994.

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